Lecture: "Educational Neuroscience of Reading Development"

Bruce McCandliss presents on the neuroscience of reading development. This is the third presentation in VL2's Educational Science Seminar.

Description:Functional and structural neuroimaging studies of adult readers have provided a deeper understanding of the neural basis of reading, yet such findings also open new questions about how developing neural systems come to support this learned ability. A developmental cognitive neuroscience approach provides insights into how skilled reading emerges in the developing brain, yet also raises new methodological challenges. This talk focuses on functional changes that occur during reading acquisition in cortical regions associated with both the perception of visual words and spoken language, and examines how such functional changes differ within developmental reading disabilities. I will integrate these findings within an interactive specialization framework of functional development, and propose that such a framework may provide insights into how individual differences at several levels of observation (genetics, white matter tract structure, functional organization of language, cultural organization of writing systems) may impact the emergence of neural systems involved in reading ability and disability.